The University of California (UC) is the latest institution to cancel its subscription to leading academic publisher Elsevier. UC cites high costs and the lack of open access research among the reasons. This likely means an increase in traffic for Sci-Hub, the site that's often referred to referred to as 'The Pirate Bay for Science', which may actually play a bigger role than some suspect.

Little more than three years ago, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, took Sci-Hub to court.

It was a mismatched battle from the start. With a net income of more than $2.4 billion per year, the publisher could fund a proper case, while its nemesis relied on donations.

Elsevier won the case, including millions of dollars in damages. However, the site remained online and grew bigger. Ironically, the academic publisher itself appears to be one of the main drivers of this growth.

In recent years there has been a major push in academic circles to move to Open Access publishing. Instead of locking academic publications behind paywalls, they should be freely available to researchers around the world as well as the public at large, the argument goes.

There has been some progress on this front, but it’s been slow. Meanwhile, Elsevier and other publishers continue to sell expensive subscriptions to universities. So expensive, that many institutions can’t afford them.

This means that their researchers run into paywalls, so they can’t do their work properly. It’s an absurd situation for the academic world, which is built on the premise that researchers build upon the work of others.

In an attempt to force a breakthrough, the University of California (UC), which includes ten campuses, requested that all its research be made available to the public from Elsevier without cost. This was possible, but only if UC’s authors paid extra publishing fees.

This was not an option for UC, which already had to pay a multi-million dollar subscription, so it cut its ties with Elsevier. The university notes that it doesn’t want to pay the rapidly escalating costs when its own work isn’t freely available.

This isn’t a problem that’s limited to UC, many other institutions can’t or are not willing to pay millions in subscription fees. This has reached a point where it’s pretty much impossible, even for wealthy universities, to access all academic knowledge.

“Make no mistake: The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley.

“Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society,” MacKie-Mason adds.

This issue is not new and Elsevier is not the only publisher to demand high subscription fees. As the largest academic publisher, however, the effects of canceled subscriptions are felt most at Elsevier.

Several universities from Germany, Hungary, and Sweden previously let their Elsevier subscriptions expire, which means that tens of thousands of researchers don’t have access to research that is critical to their work.

This is where Sci-Hub comes into play.

The “Pirate Bay of Science” might just quietly play a major role in this conflict. Would the universities cancel their subscriptions so easily if their researchers couldn’t use Sci-Hub to get free copies?

Without access to critical research, their employees can’t function properly, so this ‘pirate’ backup comes in handy for sure.

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has always been forthcoming about her goals. Sci-Hub wants to remove all barriers in the way of science. She also made that crystal clear when we interviewed her back in 2015.

“Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. Also, the idea that knowledge can be a private property of some commercial company sounds absolutely weird to me,” she said at the time.

While Sci-Hub may not be a permanent solution, its existence definitely pays a major role as a bargaining chip in a changing academic publishing world. While it’s early days, Sci-Hub certainly helped to make the paywalls crumble.

A quick look at some traffic stats shows that the site’s visitors continue to grow at a rapid rate, and with UC’s most recent decision to cancel its Elsevier subscription, this trend is likely to continue.